Embodiments of the invention described in this specification relate generally to categorization, and more particularly, to categorization of open-ended comments.
When a survey sponsor provides a forum for commenting, typically the survey sponsor is interested in identifying the types of comments being made in the forum. Generally, survey sponsors will identify types of comments through one or more categorization methods. However, categorizing comments is a time-consuming and expensive process. To date, the existing methods of categorizing comments have been error prone. One method requires survey sponsors to read comments and categorize them. This method is tedious, time-consuming and expensive because each comment must be individually read and categorized. Furthermore, because a person who reads a comment on behalf of the survey sponsor is typically not the person who conceived of or wrote the comment, the person's categorization of the comment can be inaccurate. Other methods are driven by lower-cost but complex algorithms which sometimes make errors.
What is needed is a way to accurately and immediately categorize comments.